Kafka's Curse: A Novel [Paperback]

Achmat Dangor (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 21, 2000

"Dangor writes lyrical...beautiful prose. Kafka's Curse is....full of cries that go on ringing in the head." --The New York Times Book Review

From the award-winning South African poet Achmat Dangor, an extraordinary American debut and an imaginative reinterpretation of an old Arabic fairy tale unfolds in five magical narratives set in post-apartheid South Africa.

Kafka's Curse is the story of Oscar Kahn (born Omar Khan), a "colored" Muslim architect passing as a Jewish man, married to a white woman, who eventually experiences a mysterious physical transformation, the likes of which no one can explain. As his brother Malik, a politician firmly rooted in Islam, tries to come to terms with his brother's betrayal, he abandons both his principles and his family when he falls in love with Amina, Omar's beautiful psychotherapist. With the hauntingly lyrical  and rich allegory of Kafka's Curse, Achmat Dangor commands a position at the forefront of contemporary literature.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

South African poet Achmat Dangor's first novel is a rich blend of fairy tale and reality. At the heart of Kafka's Curse lies an Arab myth about a gardener who dared to love a princess and was turned into a tree for his presumption. A similar fate seems to have befallen Oscar Kahn, a Jewish South African architect. Abandoned by his wife after contracting a mysterious malady, he dies alone and his body is undiscovered for many months. By the time the neighbors call the police, "there wasn't much left of the body to bury. It was as if it had crumbled to dust." In the bedroom where Oscar breathed his last, a tree has sprouted up through the floor. But the riddle of this man's death is superceded by the secrets of his life: born Omar Kahn, he was, in fact, an Indian Muslim, not a white Jew. In the days of apartheid, these things mattered and Omar/Oscar, who had the temerity to disguise his ethnicity and to marry a white woman, had apparently paid the price for his subterfuge.

Omar's secret may be shocking to his friends and family, but his is by no means the only one. His wife, his nephew, his brother, even his therapist, all have things they'd prefer to keep hidden--but like pulling a loose thread on a very old and fragile seam, the revelation of Omar's past begins an unraveling of secrets and lies going back generations, with tragic results. Dangor tells his story with economy and grace, offering up love, madness, and betrayal in language as lovely as the themes are grim. --Alix Wilber --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Recurrent themes of love across racial barriers, madness, suicide and child molestation are interwoven with grace and energy in this powerful story of obsession. Early on, South African writer Dangor refers to an Arabian myth of a gardener who dared to love a princess; his fate: to be turned into a tree. One of the characters here, Oscar Kahn, who years ago changed his name from Omar Khan and assumed the identity of a Jew so he could pass for "white" (Indians were considered "blacks" in apartheid-driven South Africa), suffers a metaphorically similar fate. The Khan family, with its history of mixed blood in several generations, endures recurrent tragedies as its members dare to "stray from their life's station." Virtually every character here is alienated from society in some way, and as we follow the complex circumstances of "that demonic affliction, an errant love," Dangor twines the snare of doom taut with suspense. Omar's wife, Anna, does not know he was born Muslim until after he dies; Omar's brother Malik falls into an affair with Omar's therapist, Amina Mandelstam, also a secret Muslim; Omar's son Fadiel loves blonde Boer descendant Marriane; and forebears on both sides of a complicated family tree have all paid the price of secret sexual liaisons. Yet apartheid is only obliquely evoked here: Mandela's election occurs offstage, as it were, as these characters go about their lives virtually unaware of the monumental changes that are about to occur. Because Dangor manages his plot with skill, it is all the more disappointing that the denouement depends on two violent tragedies that defy credibility. Another crucial failing is the character of Anna, who callously leaves Omar when he is dying, yet is apparently meant to earn the reader's sympathy because of sexual abuse she suffered as a girl. A smaller point: the glossary of Afrikaans terms is insufficient. Yet readers who encounter this talented author in his first work to be published here will enjoy the seductive intensity of his lyrical and sinewy prose and will appreciate the ferocious irony that underscores his picture of a country where normal human desires are forced underground by an ethically twisted society. Agent, Blake Friedmann.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; 1st Vintage International ed edition (March 21, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375704620
• ISBN-13: 978-0375704628
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,589,902 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Disturbing, memorable fiction about a changing South Africa, February 12, 2002

By 

D. Cloyce Smith (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Kafka's Curse: A Novel (Paperback)

The title of this disturbing novel is a reference to both Kafka`s "Metamorphosis" and the alienated, lonely characters who haunt his fiction. Both themes crop up throughout Dangor's novel: the fable of the man who turns into a tree, a Muslim of Indian descent who reinvents himself as a "white" Jew, and the nation of South Africa itself, before and after apartheid.

Nearly all of its characters, both white and "colored," live miserable, violent lives--symptomatic of the brutal apartheid realm. Yet Dangor convincingly adopts an astonishing range of voices: the conservative Muslim ashamed of his brother's "passing," his perceptive wife who unexpectedly leaves him, his rebellious and cynical teenage daughter, the married psychotherapist with whom he has an affair (and who may or may not be a psychopathic killer). And the novel's violent conclusion actually offers hope: that South Africa may be able to purge itself of its complicated history, just as some of the novel's women are able to leave behind the pasts that torment them.

Readers who enjoy straightforward plots, explicit symbolism, and unambiguous endings will surely be perplexed by this novel; even the family trees and the glossary won't help much in untangling the book's many possible meanings. The story is often as blurry as the racial lines created during apartheid. Yet I cannot get this novel and its lyricism out of my mind; the more I think about it, the more it seems to make sense of the nonsensical, schizophrenic society in which these people somehow managed to live.

5.0 out of 5 stars Neglected, eminently re-readable masterpiece, November 4, 2011

By 

P. A. Doornbos - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Kafka's Curse: A Novel (Paperback)

An Arabian fairy tale about the love of a gardener for a princess is the basis of this tale. The princess fails to meet her suitor in a forest, as arranged. He waits and waits, dies and turns into a tree. Oscar also turns into a dry tree-like item, when found dead long after he perished, his garden overgrown and the inside of his house covered in a luxuriant explosion of moulds and other microbiological growths...
This is a neglected 1997 masterpiece about post-apartheid South Africa about Muslims, Christians and Jews, a family history in a novella of 142 pages, preceded by 3 family trees [plus 3 unconnected, additional short stories]. It could/should have become the basis for a never-ending SA soap series because it contains all ingredients for success of the genre.
It is a warm, dense, raw and complicated story written by the main characters: two brothers who die within the same year, by their spouses, lovers, children and other family members.
Much of the tale is historical: how Indian Muslim immigrants' early fortunes were made and lost and how racial boundaries were overcome by bribes in efforts to outsmart the apartheid system with grand schemes. How a blond runaway Boer girl with strong genes whitewashed a weird but enterprising Muslim family so that one of her grandsons can become Oscar Kahn, a Jewish architect rather than Omar Khan. His estranged brother Malik is a successful politician, an Islamic role model, but privately detached, cold towards his wife and children, withdrawing into a small room to pray, read the Koran and muse about how to infuse energy into the next day of his life. But he transgresses many boundaries when he secretly forms a union with Amina Mandelstam.
This book is about messy, mixed identities, unknown fateful backgrounds and the known risks of being part of a mentally troubled family. It is not always easy to follow because the glossary is incomplete and some transitions are hard to follow. And there is mystery: a Caroline Wallace occurs in one of the family trees, is referred to once, but who is she? The novella also hosts a serial killer, perhaps two, a family ghost exacting vengance...
This book needs to be reread several times to fully appreciate its richness. Highly recommended.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Abandon all hope, ye who enter here, October 10, 2001

By 

Robert S. Newman "Bob Newman" (Marblehead, Massachusetts USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Kafka's Curse: A Novel (Hardcover)

Magical-realism is a very effective form of writing, but there is one caveat. It still ought to be understandable, otherwise it becomes totally abstract. I bought Achmat Dangor's novel in the UK a couple years ago with high hopes. It looked interesting. When I plunged into it recently, however, I found that I was going nowhere fast. It is an involved family saga, it is perhaps an allegory about South Africa before and after apartheid, and it is full of weird, largely-sexual images. In the USA, when segregation flourished, very light African-American descendants sometimes used to "pass", that is, claim to be white and live their lives by passing as white. This practice was no doubt widespread in South Africa too. In KAFKA'S CURSE, everything that is not black or white (an `absolute', that is) survives by passing. A Muslim of Indian descent passes as a Jew, marries a white woman. Crime passes as respectability. Dictatorship passes as democracy. Loneliness passes as marriage. And so on. Everyone is "ducking and diving", but what does it mean ? "Conventionally exotic", a phrase gleaned from the book, comes to my mind. Exoticism is used to wrap a very average product. I don't consider myself a literary idiot, but this one really had me puzzled. Like the art of Jasper Johns or Barnett Newman, if such work grabs you, you may like this novel a lot. If you remain sceptical, you may feel that it is a case of the Emperor's having no clothes. I suggest you try something else in that case and leave the muddled KAFKA'S CURSE for the aficionados of blank novels.